Brazen Broads Book Bash

Vampire Story That Takes It Back to the Old Country Vampire Roots The Dead Travel Fast is Deanna Raybourn's current foray into the romance genre. Her story is actually a Gothic romantic mystery, and a good one at that.  She weaves a truly interesting romantic tale between a modern, independent, and Victorian woman named Theodora Lestrange and a vampire named Count Andrei Dragulescu, who lives in the Carpathian mountains in Romania and almost functions as an homage to the granddaddy of all vampire stories, Bram Stoker, and his vampire creation.  Raybourn doesn't use any destiny tricks to bring the two together, such as their blood calling out to each other or their souls being made for one another years or centuries ago.  She creates a narrative that has Theodora leaving her homeland of Scotland and her humdrum but perfectly acceptable boyfriend, Charles Beecroft, and traveling to the land of the vampire to see a friend from school and write her first novel...

A Man Walks Into a Bar...and 400 Pages Later Doesn't Resemble Himself At All J.R. Ward is the author of the Black Dagger Brotherhood Series.  Dark Lover is the first book in the series, and its leading man is a vampire named Wrath.  If you're anything like me, that name works just like a hook should.  The reader quickly learns in the first few pages that Wrath is a character who others fear and respect; Wrath is a mean motherfucking vampire.  You don't get the name Wrath for nothing.  By Chapter Two, the reader gets the gist of the story: another vampire named Darius, who is part of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, wants Wrath to help his half vampire, half human daughter(who doesn't know she is anything but a normal human and hasn't met her father ever in her life) through what the author calls "the change", the time when a vampire becomes a vampire.  Ok.  Are you still with me here?  Some guy named Darius wants some guy named Wrath t...

The Gold Standard in Romantic Heroes Christine Feehan's Dark Series revolves around a group called Carpathians. Carpathians are what most would think of as vampires:  they drink blood, they have hypnotic abilities they use to persuade humans to do what they will, and they live much longer than humans do.  However, Feehan adds her own touch to the vampire genre with the idea of the Carpathians because while they act vampiric, she distinguishes the two species through the idea of the lifemate.  As she has one of the characters explain in Dark Magic , "All vampires were Carpathians at one time.  The vampire is the male of our race who has chosen the madness of false power over the rules of our people.  When a Carpathian exists too long without a lifemate, he loses all emotion."  In Feehan's novels, vampires are evil and Carpathians are incredibly sexy, mainly because of this lifemate concept.  It's hard to argue that a powerful male be...